Over 28 million people in the United States experience some degree of hearing loss. Approximately four million of those are profoundly deaf. Many of these hearing-impaired individuals are confronted with barriers that impede their ability to effectively communicate with others. Such barriers include the inability to use spoken language, the inability of others to use and understand sign language, and the inability to understand the language being spoken to them.
Conversations with the hearing-impaired are becoming increasingly limited due to the lack of sign language skills of most individuals. Those individuals who do not have a broad range of sign language skills are faced with a limited amount of resources available in order to effectively communicate with the hearing-impaired. For example, the use of hand written notes, the use of gestures and closed captioning devices are commonly used. Lip reading is also commonly used. However, all of these techniques are limiting for the hearing-impaired because intricate, involved conversations are not possible without the aid of a human interpreter, or the time-consuming and frustrating necessity of passing notes back and forth. Further, the use of a human interpreter is often difficult to arrange as well as expensive.
Individuals who cannot speak or hear, or individuals who are unable to verbalize communication in the language at hand, experience difficulties in performing everyday tasks such as communicating with retail clerks, law enforcement officials, teachers, neighbors, co-workers, and the like. Both the personal family scenario and the professional scenario are hampered by the communication barriers.
In addition, hearing-impaired professionals are confronted with business associates who do not read lips, do not use sign language, or otherwise are restricted in their ability to communicate with deaf or hearing-impaired colleagues. In this instance, the use of interpreters is an expensive necessity. However, the need to have private interactive conversations with deaf associates without a third party present, that is without an interpreter, particularly conversations of a sensitive nature, is a growing concern.
Medical professionals are confronted everyday with the need to communicate with patients who do not hear well or who may be deaf. In these time-sensitive and sometimes life-threatening situations, there is not always enough time to find a human interpreter in order to quickly diagnose the problem at hand.
Hence, there is a need to provide a portable interactive conversational speech communicator system that allows two or more individuals to converse without regard to the individual's language capabilities or ability to hear.